TEXTUAL ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL THEORY

Session Three

Søren Hattesen BalleEnglish

Department of Culture and Identity

Agenda Introduction: the summary assignment for today

and next time Introduction: today’s session Presentation:

figurative language defamiliarization Romanticism, Victorianism, Late Modernism

Class room discussion: William Wordsworth, ”Composed upon Westminster Bridge,

September 3, 1802” (1802/1807); Thomas Hardy, ”The Darkling Thrush” (1900, 1901); Craig Raine, ”A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” (1979)

The use of figurative language and the role and function of defamiliarization in the three poems

Poetry: figurative language Summing up on figurative language in poetry:

genre-constitutive (vs. genre-specific) poetic language (vs. ’ordinary’ language) figurative language (vs. ’literal’ language) (cf. F. Nietzsche:

”What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms [..]: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins”)

essential (vs. historical) figure (vs. imagery) trope/figure of thought (vs. rhetorical figure/figure of

speech/scheme)

Poetry: figurative language

The function and effect of figurative language in literary and poetic texts: ornamental/decorative, abusive/seductive,

(de)constructive/(de)mystifying/(de)familiarizing the inextricable relation between figures, images and meaning in poetic texts

cf. imagery ”as a major factor in poetic meaning, structure, and effect” (Abrams & Harpham)

image motifs, image clusters, thematic imagery (cf. ’falling’ and ’death’ in J. Joyce, ”The Dead”)

image vs. symbol vs. emblem (cf. W. Blake, ”A Poison Tree” and E. Morgan figures and images as means of making the abstract concrete (cf. The

Petrarchan conceit and W. Shakespeare’s demythologizing of Petrarchan poetic imagery)

figures and images as means of ’(de)familiarizing’ (V. Shklovsky) our world: re-figuration of the world; to see the world figuratively is to ’see things’ (cf. Wordsworth, ”Tintern Abbey” and R. Ellison, Invisible Man)

The self-reflexivity and critique of figurative language (cf. E. Dickinson, ”A Bird came down the Walk” and R. Ellison, Invisible Man): (de)constructive of the illusion of reference+(re)figuring of racist metaphors/synecdoches )

Poetry: figurative language Types of figurative language (dead) metaphor/(epic) simile (a ’is’ (’like’ or ’as’) b) mixed metaphor metonymy (a ’is associated with’ b) synecdoche (a ’is part of’ b) anthropomorphism/prosopopoeia (personification) paranomasia (pun) chiasmus (syntactic inversion) synaesthesia (fusion of different sense impressions) apostrophe (address to an inanimate or non-human entity) anaphora (repetition of word or phrase at the beginning of a

sequence of sentences) rhetorical question (a question asked not to request

information; the answer is self-evident)

Poetry: figurative language Romanticism, Victorianism, Late Modernism

Romanticism: faith in the power of the imagination and figurative language to transform and humanize the outside world (Greenblatt, p. 11)

Victorianism: belatedness and distance in relation to the Romantic confidence in the power of the imagination (Greenblatt, p. 996)

Late Modernism/’the Martian School’: the eye/’I’ ”sees the world with the freshness of a child or a painter or a visitor from Mars and records what it sees with an often exubererant wit”(Abrams/Greenblatt, p. 1903) → fidelity to experience and the everyday world

Poetry: figurative language

William Wordsworth, ”Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” (1802/1807); Thomas Hardy, ”The Darkling Thrush” (1900, 1901); Craig Raine, ”A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” (1979) compare the textual media which the reader is invited to think the three

poems are representations of. Does it make any difference to our reading of the poems  that Wordsworth’s poem is meant to be read as a poem, and a sonnet at that, just as Hardy’s poem is, while Raine’s is presented as a postcard from a Martian visiting the earth?

compare the speakers of the three poems what creates strangeness in the three poems? compare the figurative and rhetorical devices the poems use as means of

defamiliarization compare the effect each poem means to achieve by its use of defamiliarizing

strategies can you translate the figurative terms of “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home”

into literal terms? did you find the work of translation difficult or easy? Depending on your answer, state your reasons why.

outline a poetics for each poem